Corpora and Discourse

Corpus linguistics has made impressive strides in the fields of lexicography and grammatical description, but has had relatively little to say as yet in describing features of discourse. This volume, then, examines how it is possible to use concordance technology and the detailed linguistic evidence available in corpora to enhance the study of, among other things, how speakers/writers organise their discourse, how they express evaluation of their topics and the rhetorical strategies they employ to persuade an audience. Particular attention is paid to interrogating specialized corpora and to devising techniques to discover what is going on between speakers and between authors and readers in particular varieties of the language. These studies reveal the value of integrating corpus techniques with other, non-automatic, methods of research into the linguistic record and of combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. In general, they show how it is possible to use corpora to analyse discourse not only as product but also as process.